Bug#1037281: Please add support for MediaTek MT7986 in U-Boot

[Bernhard]

Package: src:u-boot
Severity: wishlist

Hello Vagrant

I'm interested in the Router BANANA Pi R3 from Sinovoip:
https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R3

This Banana Pi has MediaTek MT7986 (Filogic 830).

Is it possible, to support this SoC within U-Boot?
In case you say, YES, I intend to buy this new BananaPi R3 Router.

Best regards and thank you for your great support
Bernhard

[Vagrant Cascadian]

On 2023-06-10, Bernhard wrote:
> I'm interested in the Router BANANA Pi R3 from Sinovoip:
> https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R3
>
> This Banana Pi has MediaTek MT7986 (Filogic 830).
>
> Is it possible, to support this SoC within U-Boot?
> In case you say, YES, I intend to buy this new BananaPi R3 Router.

I cannot say what it will take to support it in debian for sure...

There does appear to be a target for it in upstream u-boot 2023.07-rc3
or newer, but I have not tried building it yet ... sometimes boards
require firmware that is not distributable by debian or other components
to build that are impractical to package for debian.

The doc/README.mediatek file seems to only address older variants...

The other main thing is to check what support is needed in the linux
kernel...

live well,
vagrant

[Vagrant Cascadian]

On 2023-08-29, Diederik de Haas wrote:
> On 10 Jun 2023-06-10 Vagrant Cascadian <vag...@debian.org> wrote:

>> On 2023-06-10, Bernhard wrote:
>> > I'm interested in the Router BANANA Pi R3 from Sinovoip:
>> > https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R3
>> >
>> > This Banana Pi has MediaTek MT7986 (Filogic 830).

There are now two board configs in u-boot 2024.01 that might be
relevent:

configs/mt7986a_bpir3_emmc_defconfig configs/mt7986a_bpir3_sd_defconfig

>> I cannot say what it will take to support it in debian for sure...

>> ...
>> The other main thing is to check what support is needed in the linux
>> kernel...
>

> The good news is that it appears to be supported in the upstream kernel.
...
> I have a script which helps with identifying which kernel modules would be
> needed based on the "compatible" strings in the dts file and running it on the
> mt7986a-bananapi-bpi-r3.dts revealed 1 missing component ... but a rather
> important one, which AFAICT is related to ARCH_MEDIATEK not being enabled.

CONFIG_ARCH_MEDIATEK is now enabled in the Debian kernel configuration,
although there are probably still other kernel configurations needed.

Is this script available anywhere? :)


Still outstanding is arm-trusted-firmwawre, only mediatek 81xx platforms
so far:

plat/mediatek/mt8173/ plat/mediatek/mt8186/ plat/mediatek/mt8192/
plat/mediatek/mt8183/ plat/mediatek/mt8188/ plat/mediatek/mt8195/

live well,
vagrant

[Diederik de Haas]

On Thursday, 11 January 2024 03:48:47 CET Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> > I have a script which helps with identifying which kernel modules would be
> > needed based on the "compatible" strings in the dts file and running it on
> > the mt7986a-bananapi-bpi-r3.dts revealed 1 missing component ... but a
> > rather important one, which AFAICT is related to ARCH_MEDIATEK not being
> > enabled.
> CONFIG_ARCH_MEDIATEK is now enabled in the Debian kernel configuration,
> although there are probably still other kernel configurations needed.
>
> Is this script available anywhere? :)

https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux/-/merge_requests/717#note_401554

Alper Nebi Yasak made a modified version based off of that:
https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux/-/merge_requests/906#note_442903

From that version I added `--include="Kconfig"` on various `grep -r` lines to
my script to speed it up significantly.

HTH